Do It: Race at Grand Canyon is 'run of a lifetime'

12:23 AM,
Dec. 9, 2012

Rich Dirmyer, 27, an ultra endurance athlete from Brighton, comes down the North Kaibab Trail in the Grand Canyon. Dirmyer ran/walked a round trip of the famous canyon in Arizona covering 48.3 miles in 15 hours, a one-day feat known as R2R2R.

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Rich Dirmyer has long been a fan of the Jules Verne classic, "A Journey to the Centre of the Earth.''

But the Grand Canyon isn't science fiction. It's real, carved over 6 million years by the Colorado River as if flows through Arizona. Each year, millions of tourists come to peer across the canyon's 10-mile expanse and thousands spend time hiking, camping and rafting inside its mile-deep canyon walls.

And then there is a much smaller population of extreme endurance athletes who attempt to cross this great divide - and return back in a single day. The infamous R2R2R (rim-to-rim-to-rim) run, a ...